China jails citizen journalist Zhang Zhan to four years over Wuhan virus reporting

A Chinese court has handed a four-year jail term to a citizen journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of last year’s coronavirus outbreak.

One of her lawyers, Ren Quanniu, said it was on grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

Zhang Zhan, 37, the first such person known to have been tried, was among a handful of people whose firsthand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the pandemic epicentre than the…